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It might be a bit stale and trite to say so, but Australians do a good job of being at their best in a natural crisis. Solidarity is experienced in a way absent from much of our common conversation. Why is that?
Reverend Tim Costello's informal status as a nagging conscience to many Australian governments, including the Howard government in which his brother Peter served as federal treasurer, was formally acknowledged when the National Trust of Australia chose him as a ‘National Living Treasure’. Barry Gittins speaks to Tim Costello about the nature of power, and its place and exercise in public life.
Governments have, with little opposition, passed laws that privilege individual choice on issues related to abortion, contraception, gender equality and marriage. If we regard unrestrained individual choice as the fullest expression of human development, we shall necessarily relativise and erode social bonds.
Assessments serve a valuable purpose: they give us a way to measure what students are learning. The problem is, they don’t seem to be learning. According to the Australian Council for Educational Research, recent results confirm that Australian 15 year-olds continue to show significant declines in math, reading and science when measured against their international counterparts. Australian students are learning less, and at the same time, never have we seen such an emphasis on assessments in schools.
The word ‘Catholic’ is derived from the Greek Καθολικός (katholikos) meaning universal, of the whole, and the entire tradition is the very opposite of sectarian, particularist, narrow. It is most truly itself when it’s embracing and inclusive.
The Way had been a community of homeless people, built around difficult but wonderful characters. It taught me more than I can easily say. It was a world where things were not always as they seemed and people did not fit into little boxes. We had many challenging days and relationships with our guys were seldom easy, but there was an energy that found light in unexpected places.
Greatness for the Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, was not to be found at home. Commentary on his passing is as much a statement of positions, endorsed by admiring beneficiaries, and loathed by those who fell off the train of history. The millions who delighted seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union and, as a result, a power vacuum and weaker Russia, toast him, eyes filled with emotion.
So far it hasn’t been easy to find a review in Australia from someone who has actually read the sixth and latest book in Rowling/Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike crime series, The Ink Black Heart. l wonder if it is too much to ask for people to simply read books (any books) before holding opinions about them.
Philosopher George Santayana sagely pronounced, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Yet that repetition is part of being human. We are creatures of habit and don’t necessarily notice or learn from our thoughts and deeds. Nor do we necessarily want to be made aware of that lack of learning.
Australian cultural icon and erstwhile publisher Hilary McPhee calls Telltale ‘a rare thing, an ingenious memoir,’ and she is right. It is interesting and reassuring to note that books about reading and recollections of reading habits seem to be proliferating. Perhaps such writing is a defence measure against worrying developments like universities in England, for example, axing their English Literature courses.
The most striking note in the tempestuous outrage regarding Scott Morrison’s self-appointment (technically, appointment with the Governor-General’s approval) to five ministerial portfolios other than his own, is the search for the illegal. Such a search is fruitless in a system that thrives on the principle of convention, perennially uncodified and therefore susceptible to breach.
To address climate change demands concerned action that is built on people working together for the good of all. This in turn demands the recognition that the environment is not something different from us but part of us. Our personal good depends on the common good of our world.
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